We’ve all seen them. They haunt our dreams and they sadden our realities. Huge, overstocked, obsessive video game collections can be beastly sights, and the internet has proven to be a prime method for showing off what was once a deeply personal habit. Some guys really go all out for their beloved game splurges, and to many the hobby is just as much about finding the rarest items from the medium’s history and maintaining a massive stock as it is actually playing games.

In the recent months, I’ve noticed a percentage of my gaming attention slowly get dedicated to sowing the seeds to what may someday be a rather large collection. I’ve been buying up retro consoles, pulling old games and memorabilia out of hiding, and reading up on lists of various consoles’ rarest titles, from the Sega Saturn to the Game Boy. Even if I have a limited amount of my college living-expense budget to humor this newfound interest, it’s really quite fun to become acquainted with the history and lineage of video games. But there’s a small, wormy distress that’s nagging in the back of my mind. Are we slowly losing our ability to maintain history? Is game cataloging slowly becoming a thing of the past? Let’s talk about it.